MP3Tunes legal victory over EMI is good news for Google and Amazon

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When Amazon wanted to launch a cloud-based personal storage and music streaming service, it didn’t bother to wait for the thumbs-up from major record labels. Amazon said it didn’t need their permission to launch Cloud Drive and Cloud Player. Google echoed that sentiment, launching Google Music after a protracted battle to secure rights from the labels. Ultimately, Google reached the same conclusion: we don’t need no stinking badges licenses.

There are loads of other cloud lockers out there, too, and recording industry lawyers aren’t too fond of any of them. But following a ruling just handed down in a U.S. district court, they might just have to suck it up.

Judge William Pauley ruled against EMI and in favor of MP3Tunes, a recently-launched service that allows users to upload music to the company’s cloud and then stream it to just about any connected device. Judge Pauley stated that MP3Tunes did not facilitate copyright infringement by allowing users to upload songs. Furthermore, he denied EMI’s claim that Sideload.com (a music search engine run by MP3Tunes that lets its users add music on third-party sites to their lockers) was operating outside the parameters of the DMCA. MP3Tunes repeatedly complied with DMCA-related takedown requests and disabled accounts of repeat infringers, and founder Michael Robertson told TorrentFreak that the service has “always operated[…]in a responsible manner.”

MP3Tunes didn’t get off scot-free, however. In his ruling, Judge Pauley did note that MP3Tunes should have removed infringing tunes from lockers in addition to removing their links from Sideload.com. He also found several MP3Tunes employees guilty of infringement, though that’s certainly not an indictment of the company itself. It’s a small victory for the label, however, who saw its original claim of 33,000 infringed works trimmed down to a comparatively lilliputian 350.

This story is almost certainly far from over, as both EMI and MP3Tunes can (and likely will) appeal the ruling.